The future of storage requires a lot of parts from the past, without them your data could be lost.

Everyone likes to talk about what the future of storage is going to be like, but very few of the reporters and pundits ever talk about the reality that the future requires warehousing a substantial amount of parts from the past for service, support and parts replacement.

Sometimes interesting things happen when big storage companies don’t take into account the parts availability issues. An interesting aspect of this is the expected end of life of the 5400 RPM drives that NetApp uses in their R200’s. The drive manufacturer is going to replace the drive with a 7200 RPM drive. Our understanding is that NetApp’s Ontap OS uses the RPM of drives to determine drive compatibility within their raid groups on the R200 . This could cause a problem for NetApp’s customers who are replacing drives with faster drives. Unrecognized drives can cause a raid failure.

Is NetApp working on a workaround or an update for Ontap to handle this problem? Is NetApp informing their customers of the potential availability problem? Would you want your most important data on a system with a potential problem like this? The drive manufacturer must have told NetApp about their plans to supersede their 5400 RPM drives long ago, when will NetApp tell its customers? When will they release a bug fix?

Zerowait provides an affordable alternative for parts, service and support of NetApp filers.

$$ By the way, give us a call if you have some NetApp F840’s you are looking to trade in! $$

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